Revolutionary Protests Spread Across Central and Southern Iraq and Are Ongoing

Protests in in Tahrir on 25 October. Photo by Nabil Saleh نبيل صالح. Protests in in Tahrir on 25 October. Photo by Nabil Saleh نبيل صالح.

Revolutionary Protests Spread Across Central and Southern Iraq and Are Ongoing

By : Omar Sirri

Beginning on 1 October, mass demonstrations have taken over cities and towns across central and southern Iraq. Protesters are calling for an end to the political system established in 2003. Based on ethnic and religious apportionment of government positions and ministries, this system has led to staggering levels of corruption which in turn have contributed to intolerable living standards—including high unemployment, inadequate electricity, and contamination of drinking water. The grievances are numerous and run deep, all of which are legitimate.

On Friday 25 October, demonstrators returned to the streets in planned and anticipated protests. Despite assurances from Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi that demonstrators would be permitted to protest peacefully, state forces and parastatal armed groups responded with brutality.

Iraq’s High Commission for Human Rights says that sixty-three demonstrators have been killed over the last two days. 2,592 have also been injured (combining demonstrators and security forces). This is in addition to the more than 150 people killed during 1–9 October protests, as documented by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

Most of this killing has come at the hands of parastatal armed groups once known as militias. The massive scale of protests and their geographic scope has threatened both the political class and armed groups affiliated and allied with it. What follows are some critical developments to keep in mind as events continue to unfold. They are flashpoints from which to consider a deeper, more exhaustive analysis:

In Baghdad, demonstrators tried to march into the Green Zone on Friday 25 October. Opened to the public last spring, the area had been established as a fortified and securitized command zone during the occupation of the country by US- and UK-led forces in 2003. The area hosts several key government buildings, including the offices of prime ministry. As protesters marched, they were tear-gassed and shot at. It is unclear who was firing live ammunition at them. The shooters were clad in black and wearing balaclavas. These uniforms did not have any Iraqi state security logo. Activists speculate these forces were tied to specific militias or special forces that report to the prime minister's office.

Police and military personnel in Baghdad and other cities were ordered to only carry batons during the protests on Friday. This order appeared intended to minimize casualties and protect demonstrators in the wake of weeks of anti-protester violence. Even if that goal was achieved, this tactic also perversely shows the power of parastatal armed groups who did most of the killing on Friday. Photos from Baghdad show federal police using their shields to protect demonstrators from bullets as they were marching on the Green Zone. This itself is a stunning development, in part because the Ministry of Interior, under which police fall, has for years faced an array of accusations including corruption and carrying out extrajudicial violence, including torturing detainees in secret prisons.

Demonstrators also targeted militias’ headquarters across the south of Iraq. These include the headquarters of the military and civilian wings of different militias. For example, protesters in the cities of ‘Amara and Diwaniyah stormed and/or burned the headquarters of the Badr and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq organizations, respectively. The offices of Sayyidd al-Shuhada' militia in Naseriyah was also set on fire—a significant development given how strong the group is in that area.

Demonstrators also targeted more traditional political parties and the government buildings they control—though the lines between party, parastatal armed actor, and state institution are blurry. In Diwaniyah, demonstrators stormed and burned the Dawa Party headquarters (to which two former Iraqi prime ministers belong). Demonstrators also burned the al-Hikma Party headquarters (led by Ammar al-Hakim) in Samawa. Provincial governorate buildings were also stormed and/or set on fire in the south, including in Dhi Qar, Qadisiya, and Wasit provinces.

In addition to the shooting and killing of protestors, security forces attacked protesters with huge amounts of tear gas. Hundreds of people were rushed to hospitals. In Baghdad, tear gas released from inside the Green Zone blew/carried into neighboring areas due to the sheer volume of canisters deployed.

Muqtada al-Sadr (leader of the Sadrist movement) sided with the protestors in the days leading up to 25 October. He initially stated that if protestors were attacked on that Friday, he would send his forces (Saraya al-Salam) out to defend them. But his position changed in the afternoon as attacks on demonstrators escalated. By the evening, even his supporters participating in demonstrations had pulled out. One protestor filmed the tear-gassing while shouting, "Where are you, Muqtada?" Sadr’s decision not to deploy his forces to defend protestors might be explained by a fear of provoking a war between his militia and others attacking protesters.

Also on Friday, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani released a direct and unequivocal statement supporting the demonstrators. He gave no support to political elites; called for the drafting of a new electoral law; and insisted that the relationship between demonstrators and state security forces must be strong.

The videos and photographs of those killed and injured are horrific. Images include a journalist who had his nose blown off when a stun grenade went off in front of him while in Baghdad's Tahrir Square. Out from Basra late last night is a video of a police truck ramming protesters into a barricade at high speed.

Other images show how demonstrators are using “tuk tuks” as ambulances. These motorized bike-wagons are used by low-income citizens for transporting goods in Baghdad and other urban centers. The bike-wagons are now being used to ferry wounded and killed protestors to hospitals. These images simultaneously evoke the economic grievances that ground these demonstrations, and the utter failures of state services to care for people—both when they're living and when they're dying.

Curfews and restrictions on movements were in place Friday night in the cities and across the provinces in the south. They were an attempt to re-establish "control." Electricity to Tahrir Square in Baghdad, the heart of the city's protests, was turned off during the night yesterday and again tonight to aid in forcefully evicting protestors from the square.

Notably, other Iraqi provinces like Anbar and Salah al-Din have seen little protest activity. These provinces were once held by Da‘ish. Residents state unequivocally that they support the protests but fear that if they demonstrate they will be intentionally tarred as Da‘ish supporters by state and parastatal forces in order to justify violent repression. Youth in Anbar have sent out photographs expressing solidarity with activists in other parts of the country. In the photos, activists hold up signs that show the number of killed and injured so far during the protests.

In Basra, demonstrators are taking live fire and heavy tear gas as they are being chased in residential neighborhoods. In Baghdad earlier tonight, at least 10 civilian cars without license plates and carrying armed men were seen entering Baghdad city limits. Activists also report seeing similar activity along the airport road heading towards Jadriyah Bridge. The bridge is a major connector over the Tigris River; Jadriyah, on the river’s eastern bank, is home to a number of parastatal armed groups. Neighboring Jadriyah is Karada district, where anti-terrorism forces have been deployed near the entrance to M’alaq Bridge.

Also tonight, Saturday 26 October, video from demonstrators in Nasriyah show heavy violence there, with protestors bleeding out from gunshot wounds as they are carried away. In Najaf thousands of demonstrators are currently protesting in front of the Najaf Provincial Council building. And right now in ‘Amara, hanging on the Misan Governorate building as protesters continue to demonstrate is a large banner that reads: “Closed by order of the people.”

[Sign hanging on Misan Governorate building in 'Amara, Iraq on 26 October 2019. Photo by local activist.]

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    • Ongoing Updates on Protests in Iraq

      Ongoing Updates on Protests in Iraq

      Beginning on 1 October 2019, mass demonstrations have taken over cities and towns across central and southern Iraq. What follows are some collated news and dynamics to keep in mind as events continue to unfold.

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]